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Friday, January 31, 2014

GO Launcher EX is one of the most famous third-party launchers available at Google Play Store, and comes is jam-packed with a ton of customization options. But besides the launcher itself, the GO team has also been offering many other useful apps to Android users such as GO Locker, GO Task Manager and GO SMS Pro etc. for quite a while now. The GO Team is at it again, and this time they have come up with a simple timer app called OK Timer. And while it’s quite hard to get excited about a timer app, especially when there are loads of them available on Play Store and Android ships with a basic one out of the box, OK Timer’s simple and intuitive design makes it a worthy alternative that allows you to manage multiple timers under one roof...

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Being a die hard music fan, I’ve tried a ton of music players on my smartphone. When I got my first Android phone, I immediately downloaded Winamp for the platform and enjoyed its interface as well as various features that made it a great choice. But that didn’t stop me from exploring more options in Play Store, and recently when I came across Beat, I couldn’t help trying it out. It’s a fantastic music player that lets you listen to songs that are saved locally, or placed on your Dropbox or Google Drive. Besides that, it has many great features such a powerful software equalizer and floating controls to navigate the player from anywhere in Android...

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

It’s that time of the year again, when the air is full of joy and thankfulness not just for the break from work that we’re getting, but also for the gifts of life. For avid shoppers, however, this time of the year marks another significant event – Black Friday. All the holiday sales are upon us, and if you live for the hunt to find the perfect deal, we’re here to help. What follows is a list – in no particular order – of some of the best (and unique) apps for iOS and Android that ease the Black Friday deal finding fiasco for you, allowing you to score the perfect bargain on your craved items...

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

One of the benefits of having multitasking support on smartphones is the ability to listen to music while browsing the web or using pretty much any other app. While most music players available for Android come with playback controls in the notification shade for pausing or resuming playback and skipping songs quickly without having to open the music player app itself, you still have to swipe down from the top edge, which can get a bit inconvenient when using a large device with a single hand. Also, you don’t just get to see the controls this way, but also the clutter of any other notifications that may be there. Another issue with these controls is that the notification bar isn’t available when you’re running a full-screen app. With SidePlayer, this problem will be a thing of the past. It’s is an Android app that brings up a minuscule side panel for music playback control, which you can reveal via simple edge gestures over any running app. The app carries a ton of features (although most of them are part of the paid version) and supports many popular music players. It’s also quite customizable, letting you select among different skins that fits your needs. Details after the jump!!!

Monday, January 27, 2014

Not many years ago, listening to music was an expensive hobby. You’d have to buy an expensive CD or DVD player, and then keep your music collection on tape cassettes or optical discs at hand in order to play your favorite tunes. Then came the iPod era, and changed the scenario forever. Apple’s popular portable music player and other similar devices allowed you to store a lot of songs and carry them around on the internal storage of the device for listening on the go. And now with the cloud and high-speed mobile internet access, anyone can stream music for free directly from the cloud using services like Spotify, Pandora, Google Music and many, many more. However, if you don’t like to rely on the cloud, yet want to stream your entire music library between mobile and PC, then OnAir Player is your best shot. It’s a music player that gives you remote streaming access to all the music files on your PC, Mac, tablet and phone...

Sunday, January 26, 2014

It’s hard to deny Instagram’s popularity among professional and casual photographers alike, and the Facebook-owned company has been improving the service with new features ever since it was acquired in a billion dollar deal. In the last major update, we saw the introduction of support for recording and posting 15-second looping videos to compete against Twitter’s Vine app. But what if you want to make videos out of your existing images? Flipagram is a third-party app available for both iOS and Android that lets you do that. Developed by by Cheerful, Inc., Flipagram aims to turn your Instagram photos into photographic stories, complete with background music. You can create these slideshows either from your Instagram photos, or images that are saved on your device’s storage...

Saturday, January 25, 2014

Although we have super fast smartphones in our pockets that enable us to play 3D games, watch movies, check on the news, and update social media accounts, what do the professionals among us really use them for the most? You got it right – checking emails on the go! Sending and receiving emails right from your mobile device can be a lot more convenient than having to power up your computer. Both iOS and Android devices have the excellent Gmail app available, besides generic stock email clients, but besides these, there’s a wide spectrum of third-party options available as well. Pretty much the same holds true for iOS devices. myMail is one of the newer email apps for iOS and Android that’s nothing short of spectacular. It lets you manage messages from multiple accounts including Gmail, AOL, Yahoo Mail, iCloud, Outlook, Hotmail, and other IMAP/POP3 services in its refreshingly impressive UI...

Friday, January 24, 2014

In 2013, the Federal Communications Commission revealed their plans to provide mobile users with a way to more accurately find information about mobile broadband speeds offered by their carriers and crowd-sourcing the data across the US. The aim is to help the agency crowdsource data about wireless performance for their own record keeping. To expand the program, FCC has now released a new Android app simply dubbed FCC Speed Test. The free Android app periodically runs various speed tests in the background when you aren’t using your phone. After measuring various aspects of your device and broadband performance, it displays an in-depth view of the different measured factors in a detailed report.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

If your videos, music and photos are stored on your Android device, wouldn’t it be great if you were able to stream them to your TV, iOS device, Apple TV, video game console or PC without having to shell out money for any additional hardware? All you need to do is grab this free app called Streambels, and you should be good to go! Designed to work over AirPlay or DLNA, Streambels provides a simple solution to wirelessly streaming media files and YouTube videos from your phone or tablet to any DLNA or AirPlay compliant receiver or set top box – even your PC. Its ability to cast media over these two widely popular streaming technologies means you wouldn’t need a Chromecast, any Apple-specific hardware or multiple apps on your device for the purpose. Airplay works with Apple TV, iOS, Macs and many third-party licensed hardware devices as the receiver, while DLNA is another great standard that allows you to stream media across your home network to many DLNA-compliant devices using Universal Plug and Play, and has the advantage of being found in many modern electronics like PCs, TVs, set-top boxes, media receivers and even gaming consoles...

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

One huge benefit of using an Android device is the ability to automate several everyday actions on it with apps like Tasker, Condi, RepetiTouch, Profile Flow and many others. The open nature of the OS makes it an excellent platform for automating pretty much anything that can be done on the device. Tasker may be the most famous name in this genre, but it doesn’t come cheap, and isn’t exactly all that beginner-friendly. If you are looking for a great alternative, your search just might end at MacroDroid. As the name suggests, the app lets users create macros that can be executed automatically based on some preset conditions, or manually using certain types of triggers. The actions that you can automate using this app can range from turning off unneeded radios during the night to save power, responding to specific text received in SMS with the device’s current location, and many, many more. What makes it even more useful is its several preconfigured macro templates that come with the app and can be used right away...

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Remember the Daydream feature introduced in Android 4.2.2 and Facebook Home? The folks at cloud.tv – well-regarded for their HD Widgets app – want to take full advantage of this Android feature, refine it a few notches, and turn it into a new fascinating imagery app called Dayframe. Newly released on the Play Store, this app lets you view your favorite photos from popular image sharing services like Instagram, Tumblr or Facebook etc. as photo stream slideshows, turning your phone or tablet into a digital photo frame without shelling on any expensive upgrade. Read on for our full hands-on review.

To get you acquainted with what it really does, Dayframe mimics the Daydream feature introduced in Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, adding photo streams from popular social and photo sharing networks. The app currently supports streams from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, 500px, Dropbox, and Google+. You can also upload photos straight from your device’s local Gallery.

Dayframe provides a very simple interface at the start, letting you choose your desired service right off the bat. Once you’ve picked your favorite service or skipped this process (you can always add services later at any time from the sidebar), you’re asked to select up to three unique photp streams of your choice to personalize your content. Among the available options, you will find Digital Art, Cinema, Foodie Food, Awesome People, Gaming, Geek Culture, Pop Music and a truckload more...

Monday, January 20, 2014

When Apple released its first iPod, listening to music became an entirely different proposition than it was when Sony’s Walkmans were around. But even those days are long gone now, and listening to music has evolved within that time. We’ve now moved to the cloud and streaming services like Spotify, Rdio and Pandora, bringing many of us closer to the end of offline music playback. However, people who still enjoy listening to their local music library are spoilt for choice when it comes to music players. Previously we’ve covered a bunch of such apps for Android, and today, we bring you another one labeled Noozy. It is a great music player jam-packed with impressive features that a music lover would definitely find useful...

Sunday, January 19, 2014

There were times when adding any really advanced features to even a rooted Android device required flashing a custom ROM. For those who wanted to stay on the stock ROM, the options narrowed down to flashing certain mods that enhanced its features, but such mods were generally specific to that particular version of the stock ROM and device. The development of the amazing Xposed framework has made that much easier for users, letting them add new features to their stock device by simply using modules built for the purpose that add the desired functionality at runtime, to any device with Xposed framework installed. Xposed Additions is one such module that adds features like toggling global screen rotation across the entire operating system, tweaking how it wakes when plugged/unplugged, choosing a key long-press delay, and re-assigning different actions to the hardware keys...

Saturday, January 18, 2014

With HD screens becoming increasingly available on mobile devices today, the need for high resolution wallpapers is on the rise as well. While apps like Wallbase give you access to a multitude of high res. wallpapers, some users like being surprised. Enter 500 Firepaper: released by recognized developer, Chainfire, this app grabs wallpapers at random from 500px and offers users the feature to set the background to change automatically at a specified interval. Yes, there have been other apps that serve the same function, but we’re talking about high quality and high resolution photographs uploaded by professional photographers on 500px that 500 Firepaper grabs and rotates after an interval. 500 Firepaper offers a few more features as well. We take a closer look at those and the app in general, after the break!!!

Friday, January 17, 2014

When was the last time you used a Camera app on your smartphone or tablet and you said ‘wow’? Because today just might happen to be that day after you use Snapy, The Floating Camera on Android. Unlike any traditional camera app, Snapy is designed to let you take photos no matter where you are or what app you’re using. With a single screen tap, you can launch Snapy over existing apps in a floating window, allowing you to take and edit photos on the fly. The floating window that carries the camera interface can be easily resized and moved around on the screen. It’s more like the floating video players we’ve seen in the past and on devices like Samsung’s Galaxy Note series. Snapy gives you full control and flexibility over the quality of images, letting you adjust exposure level, contrast, resolution size, white balance etc. You can also upgrade to the Pro version to unlock features like Scene Mode, startup location of the floating window as well as its size, and an ad-free experience...

All of the app’s features can be found on its Settings screen. The app provides three different methods to launch the camera app. First is the floating mode, which enables an always visible camera icon on your screen. You can tap on it and move it to your desired position. Second is the Notification icon, which – as the name implies – lets you launch Snapy from Notification bar. The third and last method is opening Snapy via a widget or shortcut. During testing, I found Floating Mode to be the most intuitive method to keep Snapy at your fingertips.

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Consider this scenario: You got yourself a Nexus device, unlocked its bootloader, flashed a custom recovery and used it to root your phone and mods for your stock ROM (or flashed a custom ROM), configured your device the way you want, enabled lockscreen security of your choice, and finally, disabled USB debugging, reflashed the stock recovery and locked the bootloader again so that in the event of your device getting stolen, the thief may not be able to get access to your data because they would need to unlock the bootloader to flash a custom recovery and install a ROM or take a backup, and unlocking the bootloader will wipe the device. That sounds all swell, up to the point where you yourself need to flash something else. This will require you to take a backup of your apps and settings using something like Titanium Backup, followed by copying everything over to your computer. What if things were easier, and you could simply unlock your bootloader from within Android without having to wipe data, and then use a custom recovery to flash whatever you want before manually relocking the bootloader? Fortunately, you can...

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

The good ol’ internet speed tests – they have been around with us for as long as our early internet days. Being a tech enthusiast, you might be aware of a lot of options out there to test your internet bandwidth, with some sites and apps offering more statistics than others. Speedtest.net, for instance, is a fairly popular name in this genre and pops up into mind whenever you feel the need to put your internet bandwidth to the test. But apart from testing your internet connection’s quality and speed, Speedtest.net doesn’t offer much of anything else. If you need to monitor your internet speed as well as keep a tab on the total amount of bandwidth your Android device has consumed so far, give Internet Speed Meter a shot. It’s a free app designed to display your current internet speed in the status bar, also letting you monitor your bandwidth use on a daily basis...

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

The recently released Android 4.4 KitKat has brought many cool new features to the table, one of them being a much smarter Phone app that now keeps track of who do you call the most, and shows those contacts higher in the list in your call log or while you’re searching for them. This saves you time when browsing a huge list of contacts. Google has already announced that KitKat will soon arrive on all major smartphones, but if you cannot hold your horses for its official release on your device and want the smart call suggestion option on your phone right away, then give Calchas App a shot. Available at Play Store for free, Calchas is deigned to show you the most relevant suggestions based on the people you regularly call. It works separately from default Phone and Contacts app, and keeps track of data on its own. More details after the jump...

Monday, January 13, 2014

Although Android devices do not have a native QR code reader yet, there’s a huge variety of third-party apps available on Play Store that you can download to easily decipher those black and white square code blocks. For those not familiar with this technology, QR codes have been increasingly becoming a mainstream mode of quickly scanning information embedded in them (such as a link, a discount coupon or even an address) via a smartphone camera. They act as enhanced alternative to standard bar codes you will find on many products. As compared to standard UPC codes, QR codes allow many more characters, textual and binary information to be stored in the code. We’ve covered a variety of QR and barcode scanners in the past here at AddictiveTips, and the latest in this genre for Android comes from none other than the GO Dev team, dubbed OK Scan. The app is very simple and does a great job scanning QR codes...

Sunday, January 12, 2014

GO Locker is a fairly popular Android lock screen replacement app that lets you apply different themes and layouts on your lock screen. The app supports a variety of different customization features such as unlock methods, widgets as well as plugins. Swipe Panel is a new GO Locker plugin that’s been recently made available at Play Store, and allows you to swipe a vertical panel out from the edge of the GO Locker in order to launch the apps you want. You can easily resize this panel, put custom apps in it as well as control its visual parameters. Details after the jump...

If you don’t already have GO Locker, you will need to download and install it first, as this plugin won’t work without it. Once everything has been setup, launch Swipe Panel and set it to ON from the settings screen. You will also find other parameters that you can customize. For instance, under Visual Setting, you can adjust the panel’s transparency level via a slider. Similarly, you can personalize its animation speed on a scale of 0 to 100. Just move the slider to you desired location, tap OK and you’re done. You can hide or unhide app labels as well.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

I still remember the day I became the owner of my first Android smartphone, and the experience was nothing short of exhilarating. I could have started off with playing games on it, streaming YouTube videos, or listening to Spotify, but the very first thing I did was checking my email – a task I had been performing as one of the first things every morning even before my smartphone life began. Mobile and emails have become an indispensable part of our lives. Therefore, having a good email app on your smartphone or tablet is always a good idea. For most people, the default Gmail app works well but for those who use other email services or just want a different option, try locking your sights at CloudMagic. Why use a third-party email client when Android comes with one out of the box, you might ask? Well, it’s because CloudMagic is so much better than the stock Email app on so many levels. So, let’s take a look at them right after the jump...

Friday, January 10, 2014

There’s no secret that most of us have to deal with various internet and network-related issues every now and then, and they can be a huge hassle at times, especially if your entire organization depends on it. Usually, we blame our ISP during outages or interruption in service, but there can be several other reasons why you might be getting slower than usual internet speeds. In any case, pinpointing the problem can be quite tedious, and that’s what services like Netalyzr aim to help you with as quickly as possible. Developed by the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley, California, it’s a popular web application that analyzes your network for possible problems. ICSI has now released an Android version of the service as well, sporting the same name and letting you quickly debug such issues after a series of tests...

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Media conversion programs have come a long way since their inception. Besides desktop programs, many media converters now come as cloud-based web applications, mobile apps, or in some cases, both. Format Factory is a fairly popular media converter for Windows that can convert files among a wide spectrum of audio and video formats. The program lets you control a number of audio/video parameters of the output file before executing the conversion process. Although not in an official form, Format Factory has now landed on Android as well. Available for free at Google Play Store, the app carries conversion capabilities found in its desktop counterpart, and allows you to perform conversion for both audio and video files. As of this writing, it supports MP4, AVI, FLV, AKV, MP3, FLAC, AAC, M4A, WAV, OGG, AC3, APE and WMA files for both input and output...

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Last year’s Nexus 4 was an awesome device that proved LG can definitely make goodlooking phones. This year’s Nexus 5 is no different, offering the best specs and the most svelte design a $350 phone has ever offered. But it’s not just the hardware where Nexus 5 really shines; the new Android 4.4 Kitkat that it ships with is every bit as impressive. We’ve already covered a summary of new features in Kitkat, so you might want to check that out as well. Those who’ve been eyeing on the latest version of Android would be aware about its new Google Experience Launcher. The search engine giant has kicked up another notch by presenting the best looking stock Android launcher yet. If you can’t wait to get your hands on it, we’ve got some good news for you. The launcher files have already been uploaded to the internet, and you grab them to try it on your own device running any version of Jelly Bean. Just follow our full guide to get it up and running...

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

When the web was still new, keeping a tab on new content around the internet was not as easy as it is nowadays. Then came RSS readers, and everything changed for the better. RSS is a technology that allows you to keep track of your favorite websites and instantly receive updates from them. Google Reader was a popular name in this genre until Google pulled the plug on it. Now that we have all had some time to get the despair out of our way about its closure – and most of us have even settled with some alternatives – new reader apps are still pouring in. Should you have been looking one for Android, try Flyne. Developed by the folks behind Falcon Pro, what makes it different from most other news readers is that it can fetch data to your local storage for offline reading. The app also has a premium version that lets you connect your Feedly and Twitter accounts to it...

Monday, January 6, 2014

Screenshots can prove to be really useful when you need to show something about what’s going on with your smartphone or tablet, or you just want to flaunt your setup at online portals like XDA-Developers or MyColorScreen. In their early days, Android devices required third-party tools for grabbing screenshots but since ICS, you can do it with a quick button combination, for instance Power + Volume Down on Nexus devices (Samsung’s Galaxy devices have been using Power + Home for the function since pre-ICS times). But what good are screenshots when you can’t instantly upload them online to share with others? That’s where ShotDrop comes in. The app uses the power of Dropbox to automatically upload screenshots to the cloud the moment they are captured, and also copies their link to your clipboard for easy sharing...

Sunday, January 5, 2014

Two years later, Google+ is still significantly behind Facebook, but Google is putting every possible effort into making it – at least feature-wise – the best social network on the web. As of yesterday, over 540 million users are active (logged in at least once over the past 30 days), while at least 300 million are actively posting in the “stream”, which is a good bump from last year. Yesterday, Google announced a bunch of new photo/video-editing and sharing tools for Google+ that we’ll be looking at in more detail after the jump...

Saturday, January 4, 2014

Roccat is a popular name among PC hardware enthusiasts. The Germany-based company is completely focused on developing accessories for computer gamers and keeping a close connection with them as one of their strengths, which enables them to produce high quality peripherals such as keyboards, mice, and headsets that meet the requirements of their users. The company has built an app by the name ofRoccat Power Grid that enables you to manage your PC from Android and iOS. It’s a fully customizable PC remote that lets you create custom controllers to monitor your system and even play games without touching the keyboard or mouse...

Friday, January 3, 2014

The popularity of Android has surged over the past few years, driven by a huge number of excellent devices and apps that have been released lately lifetime. There’s an umpteen number of Android apps designed to help you get your work done in a faster and more efficient manner. On top of that, the vast majority of them are either completely free or work on a freemium model. Network Connections is another handy free tool aimed at network administrators and IT professionals to help them monitor inbound and outbound traffic from and to their Android phone. It tracks all internet connections used by the running services and apps, and let you monitor them via their IP addresses. The app tracks information about each connection including IP address, AS number, Abuse RBL data, PTR etc. and presents it in an easily understandable way...

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Controlling torrents on your computer or seedbox from your mobile device may have sounded a bit far-fetched a few years ago, but it can be done pretty easily now, thanks to quite a few mobile apps built for the purpose. These apps give you control of your torrent applications from your phone or tablet so that you can start and stop them remotely, as long as you have access to the internet. Transdroid is a popular open-source app in this genre that offers remote control functionality to manage torrents on a range of popular torrent clients. A new project called Transdrone has recently landed in Google Play Store that allows managing all your torrents from your Android device. The app is built with code from the Transdroid project and thus, it can be configured in a similar fashion. Keep reading for more details...

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Runtastic is a well-regarded name when it comes to fitness apps. The developer has released some really awesome Android and iOS apps in the past aimed at athletes, body builders and workout aficionados as well as the average joe to get and stay in good shape. Just yesterday, we covered the recently released Runtastic Six Pack Abs Workout that guides users through several workout techniques such as curls, crunches, twists, leg lifts and other exercises to help them get the perfect abs. There was mention of Runtastic Music in our review and today, we’ll be taking a closer look at how this music player app works...